March 10: An Anniversary To Remember
Today is the 63rd anniversary of the first large-scale U.S. bombing raid of Tokyo, an event that killed some 100,000 civilians. Several marking the anniversary were held in Sumida Ward, the area of Tokyo that was hardest hit by the firebombing. Mainichi’s English edition has an article up about a giant peace mural that has gone on display at the Sumida War Office.
There was a thought-provoking Sankei Shinbun editorial yesterday on Google News about war responsibility for the bombings, which I have translated into English below [contextual links and video added]:
March 10th marks the 63rd anniversary of the indiscriminate bombing of Tokyo by American forces, in which 100,000 people died. Similar to the anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings (August 6th and 8th), it is a date that the Japanese people should never forget.
American long range bombers began full-scale bombing of the Japanese home islands after the summer of 1944. The early air raids were precision attacks on munitions factories, but that policy changed in January of 1945 with the appointment of Major General Curtis LeMay as commander of the bombing operations against Japan. LeMay adopted a new policy of indiscriminate bombing raids that targeted densely populated areas.
This was an inhumane policy that involved the dropping of incendiary bombs and carpet bombings aimed at closing up victims’ routes of escape. Indiscriminate bombing of this kind was used against Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, and many other cities. The combined civilian death toll from the firebombing and atomic bomb attacks exceeded 500,000.
In 1922, a conference of Japan, America, Great Britain and other countries drew up the Hague Rules of Air Warfare. Under Article 24 of the agreement, aerial bombing of non-military targets was prohibited. The American government had justified the firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic bombings as having taken place “to bring a quick end to the war.” However, it is very doubtful that the bombing of non-combatants was truly necessary at a point of the war in which there were already many signs that Japan had lost.
In Mirror for Americans, Japan, a book banned from publication during the American occupation, author Helen Mears stated that after the March bombing of Tokyo, the American military’s enemy was not merely the Japanese military: the general civilian population of Japan had become the primary target of the war. Mears also wrote that America knew of surrender negotiations Japan was attempting via Moscow, and the atomic bombings were dropped as part of America’s political conflict with the Soviet Union.
Ashita e no Yuigon (Best Wishes For Tomorrow), a film concerning the postwar trial of Lt. General Tasuku Okada for the wartime execution of American B-29 pilots, has been showing in theaters across Japan since March 1st. It is a film that raises questions about how leaders ought to act and the inhumanity of indiscriminate bombing. There has been a high interest level in the film among those who experienced war as well as younger Japanese viewers. It has been also said that the film received great applause when it was screened at film festivals in America.
The issue of responsibility for the indiscriminate bombing during the Pacific War should be re-examined, particularly by the younger generations in Japan and America.
[I am not a professional translator, so it's probably far from a perfect translation. However, I think I was able to get most of the meaning down correctly...]
A note for readers with access to Japanese TV: A special docudrama about a photographer who took famous photos of the Tokyo Firebombing will be airing tonight at 9:00PM on TBS. The Japan Times has mentioned that the film will recreate the firestorm that destroyed Sumida ward using state-of-the-art computer graphics.
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I guess the best way to avoid all this finger pointing and blame placing is to NOT start wars in the first place.
//before all the “flame the american” comments start, keep in mind I’m german.
Absolutely right on man.
If Japan had decided to not have a war there would be no bombing to write an article about.
Well, that would be very dull, now wouldn’t it?
Reality is a lot more complex than that. Japan was trying to build an empire to match the modernisation of it’s society and economy. Unfortunately for them Britain and the US already had empires (e.g. the Philippines for the US) and they were not going to let anyone else build their own without a fight. So in a way Japan had no choice but to start a war.
Of course the correct thing to do was not be an imperialist at all, but you can’t really say that Japan was especially evil for wanting one when all other major nations had their own.
WW2 in Europe is probably the only “good war” in history because of the horrors of the holocaust. The Pacific war was just another power struggle between expansionist empires, the US included.
“WW2 in Europe is probably the only “good war” in history because of the horrors of the holocaust.”
Wasn’t that only known after the war was won?
It’s horrible enough to hear ” The combined civilian death toll from the firebombing and atomic bomb attacks exceeded 500,000″.
But the civilian death toll by land battle is usually much more. Japan experienced land battle in only Okinawa and 200,000 civilian died there. Remind the total death toll of Germany (7 millions) compare with Japan (3 millions) in WWII. Or Korean War (4 millions).
You can’t really compare Germany and Japan as Japan, the main islands at least, were never invaded. At best we can make assumptions, but there are so many variables that stating anything for certainty is very dangerous. It would have been carnage had Japan held out to the last man, woman, and child as they threatened, but what were the chances of that?
Jesus Christ Japan, give it a rest.
Tell me, no seriously I’m honestly curious, do the Japanese have national remembrance and anniversaries to all the crimes against humanity they committed? After all this bullshit, they damn well better.
Believe me, I’m all for holding people responsible for past transgressions, but come on, and the U.S needs to be held responsible. But it’s hardly fair for Japan to throw shit in the face of the U.S. (despite how you, me or anyone else feels about the U.S.) while sweeping their shit under the rug. Fuck that. Thats irresponsible and absolute bullshit. You can’t be a fucking bully and then cry when a bigger bully beats your ass.
Guess I’ll change my name to Johnny Blaze now. Flame on, jerks.
Every December 7, I dread being a Jap in the United States.
“Day of Infamy” indeed.
I am reminded every year how much the US does exactly what it claims Japan does with its history books – subvert the real information, the truth.
Just as Japanese school children are now accused of being ignorant of its own horrific mid-20th century history, the US subverts almost all of its 200 year history left and right.
But December 7 brings chills down my spine every year as the US “celebrates” its supposed reason to enter WW2.
You look at Hawaii now, and its history of how it came into being – it really is pathetic on all fronts, from it being a British colony to a united Hawaii kingdom who gave into be “annexed” by the US by the beginning of the 20th century, at the same time the Japanese had been going there to settle and lay their claim to the place too, and now – it’s a major holiday destination for the whole planet and the US has the gall to keep a major, massive military presence there that wastes so much precious, beautiful land and dirties the environment –
and all the while, you goto the West coast of Oahu, there are literally THOUSANDS of homeless and disenfranchised local tribes and refugees who have all collected there, living in tents and ramshackle huts…………………… while on the other side of the island a million people live there in million dollar homes……………………………….
Japanese people and servants of the lords may have been stupid to listen to its greedy, power-mad Emperor and Imperialist Generals and Shoguns by trying to expand across South-East Asia during the first half of the 20th century; however, most objective modern historians will tell you that the US did not actual win any wars at all in the 20th century (from WW2, Korea and Vietnam to the wars in Latin America and Cuba), that the technology did the winning and not the people nor its soldiers, that the technology of the Atom Bomb created an impasse.
Dirty firebombing tactics like this to annihilate the race and its people is a hallmark of the US, it is what the US has been and will always be known for, for all time – just look at what it’s still doing to the remaining “conquered” Native American peoples by sticking them into “reservations,” by shutting in the left-over annihilated peoples and hoping that they would go away and die on their own by not helping them.
Keep pointing the finger ya dumb humans!
I’m not sure if you went to school in the US, but yea my history books did talk about the horrible things our country had done. It probably didn’t have them all but at least it was presented as a means to learn from past mistakes.
War is a truly horrible thing and really terrible things happen during it I think we can all agree on that.
I really wonder how much the Japanese history books talk about the awful things done by its military?
And regardless of what you think about Dec 7th and all the various sides to the cause of the war, Japan did throw the first punch.
“I really wonder how much the Japanese history books talk about the awful things done by its military?”
A decent amount. Though it is difficult to squeeze everything in there due to lack to space: there are price limits on textbooks, so they tend to be only about 200 pages of so, and if you have to cover all 2000 years of Japanese history in that then you need to prune a lot.
What an ironic last sentence by AA
“In 1922, a conference of Japan, America, Great Britain and other countries drew up the Hague Rules of Air Warfare. Under Article 24 of the agreement, aerial bombing of non-military targets was prohibited.”
This is rich. I’m sure the Chinese would have liked Japan to follow those rules…. At any rate, the powers that be in the US determined that it WAS a military target. In fact, it was not “indiscriminate” bombing at all. They were aiming to wipe out the small-scale piecework factories and worker that supplied the aircraft and munitions factories. That is why it was the ’shitamachi’ that was targeted, rather than the more upscale residential areas. The real reason for the massive death toll in the early hours of the 10th was not the sheer number of bombs dropped (which were many) but the fact that the flames were fanned by a stiff breeze and whipped into an inferno. In other words, the result was all out of proportion to the attack.
And downed B-29 pilots who survived to be executed by the army were some of the lucky ones. The less lucky ones were torn apart by lynch mobs.
“The issue of responsibility for the indiscriminate bombing” What issue? Is the Sankei seeking to attach blame, more than six decades after the event? Everyone wants to blame someone for something. Suck it up, and then go and ruin the former enemy’s home electronics industry in revenge…. Anyway, let’s not forget that the Sankei is perhaps Japan’s most right-wing major newspaper, so their take on it may be different to, say, the Asahi. This is a very self-serving editorial indeed.
遺言 (yuigon) is generally Will or Testament, as in Last Will and Testament, rather than Best Wishes. No idea why the JT changed the title.
A whole lot of folks missed the real reason which you stated is that the war-making capabililty had migrated to the mom and pop factories within urban areas.
Any fool willing to study airpower history would know that. 100% of U.S. Air Force officers have studied this and the effectiveness of airpower to the strategic objectives during WW II.
Failure to state all the facts is lying by omission.
I agree Japan started nasty war.
But it’s about something on Hague Rules of Air Warfare, a conference of Japan, America, Great Britain and other countries drew up in 1922. Under Article 24 of the agreement, aerial bombing of non-military targets was prohibited. And it’s also about ” the winner takes it all “.
If there were many signs that the Japanese had already lost the war, perhaps they should have heeded those signs and surrendered, it would have saved a lot of lives.
It’s hard to sympathize with Hitler’s allies
How much responsibility does Japan take for enabling and prolonging the Holocaust?
“How much responsibility does Japan take for enabling and prolonging the Holocaust?”
None. How much should it take? Or should we blame Chamberlain? Or the Treaty of Versailles? Personally, and I know this is pretty controversial, I tend to blame ol’ Uncle Adolf….
“If there were many signs that the Japanese had already lost the war, perhaps they should have heeded those signs and surrendered, it would have saved a lot of lives.”
They did, on August 15.
If you do want to blame Japan for what the Germans did, then blame their defiance of the League of Nations, which showed Hitler how toothless they were. This was of course well before any Final Solutions, or even Semi-Final Solutions.
Yes, Chamberlain does bear some responsibility for the Holocaust. And Japan does to, they allied themselves with the Nazis and took resources away from the European theater, thus extending what their allies did.
It’s extremely naive to believe that the Holocaust was the work of only one person. Or because others were to blame that absolves Japan of any of its guilt. Japan allied itself with Hitler and its actions in the war aided Hitler, Japan is not as responsible for the Holocaust as Germany, but it’s rewriting history to not hold them at all responsible.
Kovert,
Do you really think Japan could have avoided this war? The US was going to take over as much of Asia as it could, one way or another. That left Japan without any oil and rubber.
This doesn’t change the evils Japan perpetrated on Asians, it’s just to bring up the point that sometimes Americans discuss the evils of other empires, such as the Soviets or Japanese, and forget they’ve got the most powerful one in world history – and empires aren’t pretty.
I was always under the impression that the US attempted to cut of Japans supplies so they would stop trying to conquer all of Asia. Japan had been waging war years before any US blockades.
i’ll keep it short and to the point. i have no problem with japan airing such things, but i do have a problem with their gov/society playing the victimized card of 100,000+ people dying in the firebombing incident of tokyo and other incidents of the past.
when japan can identify what is it they did all over Asia, then they can put this war is horrible information.
yes war is war and war is cruel, but if we are going by numbers of how many people japan killed/raped/deformed in asia compared to how many japanese were killed under the americans then it’s pointless since the amount is less than what the japanese did to other asian regions.
and for you people out there, i am not some chinese or korean troll.
Don’t worry – the Chinese and Korean governments do the wailing for their own people. They’re not forgotten. Each country mourns its own.
“when japan can identify what is it they did all over Asia”
What exactly does this mean? Surely you’re not implying that Japan (note the use of the upper case: a quirk of English and other European languages) has no idea what it did in Asia? Not that I am sure who you are referring to when you say “Japan” like that – every single one of its 128,000,000 citizens? Or the Prime Minister? Or have repeated nukings (two, at any rate) mutated the soil so that the country actually is alive and has its own opinions?
overthinker
for a person who implies a name of overclocking one’s brain, sure isn;t a lot of thought into what my generalized statement was…unless of course you were being sarcastio. i really dont think i needs to go writing a long post here to go rival some other person’s blog or personal views on history
but i guess ill drop a few lines, such as rape on nanjing, rape of manila,
the deathrailway road in southeast asia
http://iht.com/articles/2008/03/10/asia/thai.php
and yes i do see it as a personal insult to the asian continent when past prime ministers of japan and other officials go and visit the shrine that houses class a war criminals as defined by the U.N. i have no problem what so ever with the war dead being honored. i do have a problem when class a war criminals are buried there. personally ive never been to the shrine that so many countries especially in east asia get pissed of. ive had quite a few of my friends though who are in japan working/studied that have gone there and tell me it’s creepy/weird.
as far as im concerned it disgusts me when i hear my roommate(im in china, beijing to be exact…and he is chinese from the northeast region) “fuck the japs”. it does disturb me. i personally see no problem with the japanese; ive dated one for 2 yrs and got to know her family; and ive befriended many back in my uni days/ i do have a problem with the current gov or certain leaders to just have the balls and get it done over with…go to the U.N. podium and say sorry we f*cked up..well that would be too general to say, but i do hope you are getting my point in what i am trying to say.
Yes, there was sarcasm in my comment, but there was also a more serious side. You seem to be implying that these wartime atrocities committed by Japan are totally ignored by the country. You do not specify which parts of the country you refer to as ignoring these, but merely claim “Japan” does. This is nonsense. If you wish to claim certain groups or individuals do, then name them. I would imagine from your reference to Prime Ministers that this is what upsets you. If so, be specific – and accurate: no one is buried at Yasukuni. It is a shrine housing souls, not bodies. And visits to Yasukuni by Japanese politicians are very controversial in Japan as well. In fact the Emperor stopped going after the A-Class criminals were enshrined, many decades after the Tokyo War Trials. Again, it seems to be the fact that it is the A-Class war criminals that are there that upsets people, but I wonder how many people actually know the difference between A, B, and C class war crims. It’s not a degree of guilt as such. Nor did Tojo himself (for example) personally brutalize Chinese. His crime was the very general “crimes against peace,” which basically means waging war.
The soul-searching that goes on in Japan about war guilt is far more extensive and deep than you seem to realise. Specific awareness of incidents is probably low among the general populace, who are ignorant of pretty-much anything that isn’t of immediate use or the latest trend, but nevertheless a deep and pervasive sense of guilt does affect Japanese relations with East Asia.
I don’t know about going to the UN podium, but many Japanese PMs have indeed said “sorry, we fucked up” (not in those precise words, however). Have you examined these apologies? What do they lack?
Also, Chinese (official) views of Japan and the war are very much coloured by propaganda, far more so than Japan, where a lively and freer press puts out a whole spectrum of opinion. The fact that some sections of Japan expresses opinions about the war that may be off the chart does not mean that all do, or that this is even that common. And it certainly does not mean that the Chinese (for example) point of view is automatically correct because some of the Japanese ones are extreme.
And capital letters are your friend, trust me….
I agree that it is very sad that the class A war criminals were “interred” (or whatever the correct English word is, 祭られる) at Yasukuni. It happened in the 60s or 70s because the management of the temple were right wing bastards. Problem was the government couldn’t do anything about it because the americans had enforced strict separation of religion and state (understandably) in the post-war constitution and the shrine is administered by a private organisation.
There is no other monument were the war dead are honoured so there is no where else to go.
“Enshrined” is a better word. There are no physical remains to inter.
What’s interesting is that they say that they can’t “un-enshrine” them, but let’s face it: a religion can make up its own rules, so if they really wanted to, they could just declare it done.
Interesting the article about the trial of Okada. However I don’t get why the author thinks the trail was so “utterly fair”.
He had tried american pilots who had probably killed thousands of civilians, found them guilty and executed them. What’s the problem? That they were only following orders? I believe current war crime laws say that this is not a valid excuse, you must refuse to carry out such orders. Was it the execution method (beheading judging from clip)? It might be construed as a bit more “cruel” than e.g. a bullet to the head, but hardly grounds for sentencing someone to death.
Sounds more like a classic case of victor’s justice to me.
Another thought that occurred to me:
The Japanese army probably committed quite a few quite bad war crimes in e.g. Nanking and other places. However I’m quite sure deliberately targeting civilians was never _official_ policy. The problem were the local military leaders who did not follow the official line.
In the case of the atomic bombs and fire bombings however you have the highest military leadership basically saying “Yes, we know hundreds of thousands of civilians will die but we don’t care!”. Same with with RAF in Dresden.
Here we need to differentiate between “official policy” and “policy of the officials.” Also, determining exactly what happened in the chain of command is very hard, as the first thing that Japan did as a nation after the surrender was burn every war-related document it could find – this even happened in the war reservists societies of remote country areas. Thus I would be very careful about saying what is and what is not “official policy.” Nanking was an example of where the two violently differed. The idea was that Japan would set a really good example. The reality was somewhat different. Who determined that, and when? The conspiracy theorists seem to feel that General Matsui Iwane was overruled by Prince Arisugawa (if that is the right one: one of the Imperial Princes who was on the ground at the time).
Similarly, with the firebombings/nukings, it’s not so simple as “we don’t care,” it was more like “a hundred thousand of the enemy must die to save at least that many American boys.” One thing that was amazingly cynical however was the way that returning B-29s would unload any spare bombs they had on random cities in Japan, especially Hamamatsu, as it was on the way back from Tokyo. They didn’t really need to bomb them – it just saved fuel and was safer to not carry them….
Very important for young generation never forget how much past ancestor suffer so much because of US bombing the cities. I hope this will never never happen again.
The Japanese revisionists can all it whatever they want but indiscriminate bombing of Nanking never targeted just military objectives. I imagine the bombing of the “open city” of Manila was simply “a mistake”?
Likewise, the thousands of Chinese civilians in Nanking, Hong Kong and Singapore were never massacred deliberately. I assume they ran backwards, at high speed of course, so they could have their heads severed by the peaceful Japanese soldiers standing around in astonishment.
The Japanese should thank God every day that the atom bombs prompted the Emperor to surrender. His own atom bomb project could not respond in time. The insanity of dying for an erzatz “God” still brings dishonor to intelligent people.
”The Japanese should thank God every day that the atom bombs prompted the Emperor to surrender. ”
As for whether the atomic bombs prompted the Emperor to surrender, see
http://ianfu.blogspot.com/2008/01/did-nuclear-bombings-of-hiroshima-and.html
And who should the Chinese people thank if Nanking Massacre had prompted Kuomintang to surrender and saved other Chinese people killed thereafter by Japanese, Chinese nationalist party, Chinese communists?ーーーChiang Kai-shek？
It’s funny… when we discuss America’s actions in the Pacific War we talk about the rights and the wrongs of what they did.
However when the Japanese discuss their actions in the war it usually seems to be about whether Japan’s atrocities actually happened or not, or quibble over the actual number of dead or argue over some detail to the extent that the atrocity itself is obscured.
Why is this?
At least the Americans admit to what they have done and then are prepared to debate the rights and wrongs of that.
In my time in Japan I have never ever seen a TV documentary that focuses on one atrocity carried out by the Japanese.
A documentary that examined the facts, that included interviews with veterans who took part, that sought out survivors and interviewed them, etc.
Maybe I missed it!
What I have seen year after year is countless documentaries portraying “Japan as victim”… Japan’s suffering, Japanese people dying, Japan destroyed. Watch Japanese TV around the beginning of August to see what I mean.
I guess TV stations are scared of the blaring black trucks turning up outside.
Yeah you missed it but no one can miss that big chip on your shoulder.
People like you who dont see both sides of the subject and the gray zone creat most of the worlds misunderstandings and problems.
Watch the nhk documentry about the unit 731 or the Japanese movie about the war which discusses and interviews Japansese souldiers and there crimes…OH im sorry those things must not exists since you researched about the subject intensively.
I guess the patriotism in you is scared to face it.